“We know charities that have been critical of policies of the Harper government are being audited by the Canada Revenue Agency. With mounting evidence suggesting bias in auditing decisions, we need to find out what’s going on here,” said Rick Smith, executive director of Broadbent Institute, a non-partisan organization founded by former NDP Leader Ed Broadbent.

In the ongoing battle to win approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, Canada has repeatedly justified its climate inaction by pointing to the fact that it shares similar emission reductions targets to the U.S. In August of last year, Prime Minister Stephen Harper even wrote a letter to President Barack Obama inviting “joint action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the oil and gas sector” if such efforts would help green-light the Keystone XL.

But this week’s announcement that Obama will use his executive authority to introduce a nationwide emissions reduction plan that targets more than 1,000 of the country’s most highly polluting power plants might leave Canada squarely in the dust.

A photographer who has shot for National Geographic Traveller is setting out on a road trip along the proposed route of the TransCanada Energy East pipeline. Robert van Waarden is trying to crowdsource $10,000 to partially cover the costs of his project to put a human face on the proposed $1.2 billion project.

“There is an opportunity to tell the personal story about how people along the line feel,” van Waarden says about his motivation to capture stories from a cross section of Canadians stretching from “the fisherman on Grand Manan Island to the farmer in Saskatchewan.”

Energy East is a massive project proposed by TransCanada Corp. to bring 1.1 million barrels a day of western oil to eastern markets along a 4,600-kilometre pipeline. It involves the conversion of an existing gas pipeline, the development of 72 new pumping stations along the route and new pipelines to connect the line from the oilsands in Alberta to Quebec City and then on to St. John, N.B.

Last week marked the third anniversary of the largest inland oil spill in US history. On July 25th, 2010 a 41-year old Enbridge pipeline in Michigan tore open spewing over three million litres of diluted tar sands bitumen or dilbit from Alberta into the Kalamazoo River and the surrounding area. Three years later the spill from the Enbridge pipeline known as Line 6B is still being cleaned up with the cost nearing one billion US dollars.

The Kalamazoo spill drew wide spread attention to the dangers of shipping dilbit through North America's oil pipeline system. Now environmental organizations and residents of Ontario and Quebec fear Enbridge's plan to ship dilbit from Sarnia, Ontario to Montreal, Quebec through the 37-year old Line 9 pipeline. They worry this will put their communities at the centre of the next 'dilbit disaster.'

“What happened at Kalamazoo could happen here with Line 9,” says Sabrina Bowman a climate campaigner with Environmental Defence based in Toronto.

“People in Ontario and Quebec need to know the Line 9 pipeline is very similar in age and design to the ruptured Line 6B in Kalamazoo,” Bowman told DeSmog Canada.

From Koch Industries’ roots as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”, David and Charles Koch have become household names for funding climate change denial and efforts to steer the United States away from a clean energy future. They suffered a little hiccup when California voters failed to buy the arguments of the dirty oil interests bankrolling Prop 23. Then, when David Koch was booed at the Nutcracker ballet just before Christmas, it started to look like the tides were shifting on public opinion around the billionaire brothers.

Despite the headway made in holding the Koch Brothers to account, they’ve creeped their way into Canada.

On the policy development front, they’ve busily bankrolled Canada’s Fraser Institute to the tune of $175,000 between 2005 and 2008 to ensure Canada remains in the Stone Ages when it comes to environmental policy.

The environmentalists’ report, Duty calls: Federal Responsibility in Canada’s Oilsands aptly argues that filthy tar sands development is on track to derail any and all of Ottawa’s targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Duty Calls outlines Ottawa’s responsbility for environmental management in the oil sands and explores what’s at stake if Ottawa continues to neglect this responsibility.

Our political leaders have been more talk than walk in terms of managing the tar sands, but the Vancouver Sun’s Yaffe argues that politicians must have their reasons. She refers to William Kimber of the Alberta-based Canada West Foundation, who argues that, as filthy as the Fort McMurray enterprise is, we can’t dispute that it’s fuelling the economy. It’s the age-old, foolish ‘economy vs. environment’ positioning that is a non-starter when you consider that there would be no economy without the value of environmental resources.

What the Vancouver Sun fails to note is that the ongoing deregulation of the tar sands benefits Big Oil more than the residents of Alberta or the environment, and that’s a serious problem in the long term, both for the environment and the economy. Failing to regulate the tar sands leaves the federal government exposed to ongoing and sustained legal challenges, and exposes the oil sands industry to tougher environmental restrictions in the international marketplace. Continued federal absence leaves Canadians vulnerable to the economic uncertainty resulting from tying the value of the Canadian dollar to the price of oil.

In the face of every toxic threat that humans have yet created, here is a realization that is equally optimistic and discouraging: humans needn’t fear science; but we should be terrified by the lies we tell ourselves about the good and bad things that human “mastery” of science can bring.

This point struck me as I was reading Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie’s excellent book, Slow Death by Rubber Duck. As the lighthearted title suggests, this is a jaunty walk through the horrors of chemical poisoning - a very personal voyage of discovery by the authors, who actually arranged for themselves typical exposures to the kinds of cancer-causing chemicals that all of us might run into on any particular day.

Their conclusion (minor): risks lurk around every corner. Their conclusion (major): Our failure to recognize and regulate those risks is not based on a lack of knowledge. It’s based on a high degree of societal recklessness that flows directly from leaving the chemical salespeople in charge of risk management. The chemical and pharmacological industries’ profit-driven public relations is trumping our efforts to make prudent judgments about our health and safety.

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.